The Quiet Game

She gives me an insouciant smile and dives again, so deeply that I lose sight of her. When she surfaces, she is at the edge of the pool, holding something in her hand. Not the wine. Her bathing suit. She drapes the white lycra over a cypress knee, then with a graceful roll pushes away from the stump and, floating effortlessly on her back, drifts to the center of the pool. This vision is more potent than any wine; it is my dream made flesh: Livy's hair floating in a corona around her face, her arms loose at her sides, her breasts little rose-tipped islands, her abdomen a submerged reef stretching to the rise of her pubis with its twist of burnished gold. The sight of her heats the backs of my eyes. As I gaze down, she raises a hand to block the sun and calls out:

"Don't you swim anymore?"

I scoot to the edge of the platform and drop forty feet through space, plunging deep into the pool. When I float to the surface, I find Livy treading water beside me. She splashes me playfully and says: "I really thought I could find it."

"Even if you had, it wouldn't make things like they were before. We have to talk about what happened."

She looks off through the silver cypress trunks. "I can't. Not yet." She stops treading and lies back, half floating, gazing into the hazy blue sky. "I've thought about that bottle sometimes. Over the years."

"Me too. During low times. Four o'clock in the morning, wondering if I ever made a single right choice in my life."

She seems amused by this. "Not me. I thought about it during good times. Or times that were supposed to be good. I thought about it on my wedding night."

"Your wedding night?"

She turns her head slightly, watching me as she floats. "There I was, supposed to feel some profound completion as a woman, and all I could think was that I was closing off forever an option I'd always thought I had."

"And you did."

Her eyes narrow. "You hadn't exactly made me feel wanted the last time we'd seen each other."

I look away, unwilling to explain my actions on the night of the ball without reciprocal explanations from her.

"We should have drunk that bottle twenty years ago," she says. "The extra time it would have taken might have changed everything that came after."

I shake my head, unwilling to grant her this easy revision of history. "Then I wouldn't have Annie."

For a moment she looks as though she might make some cruel remark, but her face softens. "I didn't mean it like that. We're here now. I'm not complaining." She brings herself upright in the water, flips a wet strand of hair from her eyes, then reaches out and touches my nose. "Will you do one thing?"

"What?"

"Kiss me."

Livy has given me nothing that I need, not a single answer. But I want to kiss her. Between the fatigue of treading cold water and the proximity of her naked body, I feel as though every capillary in my skin has dilated, magnifying sensation. She swims closer and slips a hand behind my neck. I lean forward and press my lips to hers, gently at first, then harder in response to her passion. Treading water is impossible now. I take a quick breath through my nose as we slide beneath the surface.

Undulating in the slow current of the spring, time is the oxygen remaining in our lungs and blood, but there is enough to remember her taste, the pressure of her breasts against me as we sink like a single creature, an incarnation of salt water, only slightly denser than the fluid surrounding us. As my chest begins to burn, I feel the soft roughness between her legs, pressing against my thigh, seeking more complete union, and I swell with unthinking eagerness. Then my lungs betray me, sending me fighting toward the shimmering surface. I smash through gasping for air, resenting the fact that I need it. Livy gently breaks the surface beside me, her neck and shoulders flushed the color of broken seashells. She pulls back her hair, then treads easily as her clear blue eyes search mine.

"I want you inside me."

I shake my head.

"I love you, Penn. I always have. I just didn't have the courage to choose you."

Her words are like needles thrust into my heart, triggering emotions too intense to withstand, much less interpret. Caitlin's warning on the plane sounds in my head: She could really mess you up-

"You don't have any right to say that, Livy."

"I know. I won't say it again. But I had to let you know."

I roll away from her and swim back to the fallen tree that leads to the shore. As I climb onto it, I turn and see her perched on the cypress knee where she left her bathing suit, slipping on the white lycra as gracefully as she does everything else.

"Where next?" she calls across the water, making no attempt to cover herself.

"I think it's time we got back."

"Home? But the day's not half over."

"I need to check on Annie."

She nods somberly. "I understand."

I turn and make my way carefully along the slippery log. For any other woman I would wait, but Livy Marston can take care of herself.